This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
King Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion on July 18, 1290, ordering every Jew in England out of the kingdom by All Saints' Day that coming November, a deadline that gave the country's Jewish community little more than three months to leave everything behind.
Historians debate the balance of causes behind the order rather than settling on a single explanation. England's Jewish community had already seen its usury trade, long its principal legal economic role, banned outright in 1275, leaving it in financial decline well before the expulsion itself, and Edward's order also followed a pattern of earlier expulsions carried out elsewhere in Europe that gave the English crown both precedent and cover.
Whatever combination of causes drove it, the order itself was total. An estimated 3,000 Jews left England in the months that followed, and no legally recognized Jewish community existed in the country again for over three and a half centuries afterward, the longest single expulsion of any Jewish community from its host country anywhere in Europe.
What Edward I's edict changed for Judaism's spread in England was its complete removal from the country's legal and religious landscape for more than three hundred and fifty years, a single royal order erasing a community's legal existence in a kingdom more thoroughly, and for longer, than any comparable expulsion managed anywhere else on the continent.